Roland-Garros and aristocratic institutions

I watched the French Open men's final on Sunday. The combatants were Jannik Sinner, a 23 year old German-blooded Italian, and Carlos Alcaraz, a 22 year old Spanish Moor. Great match, but I miss the elegance and athletic beauty of Federer. As a man of tennis, I'd like to mention a trend that is widely known within the sport but not known well at all outside of it: the utter dominance of American men before the turn of the millennium, and the utter dominance of European men after.

This shift corresponds to the aging out of the last great generation of American tennis players (Agassi, Sampras, Chang, Courier), who were all born between 1970 and 1972 (WTF happened in 1971). You can take a look for yourself on the fruit-of-autism website below:
https://www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com/topRankingsTimeline

Tennis is primarily a sport of technique, coordination, and fine motor control. As such, players benefit greatly from intense training by tasteful, intelligent coaches in early childhood. It's very rare to find a top-class player who didn't begin well before the age of 10 and spend at least a decade training at a tennis academy. The life of a promising young player at such an academy is almost entirely focused on athletic development. Academies are very expensive, and gaining entry to the best is often highly political and conditional on family connections. In short, they are aristocratic institutions. As a result, the comparative ability of a country's professional tennis players is a good measure of the health of their aristocratic institutions.

The decline of American tennis talent tracks very well with the decline of aristocratic institutions in America, and the maintenance of European talent should tell us that they're doing fine over there at the top (boots on the ground experience bears this out for me). I don't see much interest in sports from people in our sphere (apart from the occasional baseball jew), which I think is a shame. There's much to be discussed here, especially as it relates to selective breeding, physical training, combat prowess, embodied thinking, etc.

Good post but I'm gonna disagree with the framing. tbh the hyperspecialized "start training for a sport while you're still in the womb and make it the sole focus of your life" stuff never seemed aristocratic to me. I understand the aristocratic focus on sports to be as one element of a well-rounded life, more like a serious hobby which cultivates physical prowess, embodied striving for mastery and glory, and homosocial competition. The idea is to give a foundation for a life devoted to some other end.

From the aristocratic standpoint, making one single sport the purpose of your life seems like a weird hypertrophy of something that was healthful in moderation, some sort of cargo-cult of a private aristocratic practice for purposes of consumerist public spectacle.

College football used to exist to help the education of the college students who would become American elites. Now it's a massive entertainment business in its own right which happens to be grafted to state colleges for historical reasons, and which average students can't actually participate in. So it goes.